Our contemporary celebration of African American culture, especially our concern for “authentic” blackness and the vernacular, owes much to the New Negro era. From Hip Hop, to movies depicting black inner city life, to spokenword poetry, to “Chitlin' Circuit” theater, and beyond, black folk expression (either rural or urban) has come to serve as the sign of black cultural identity. Yet the centrality of the vernacular was not always evident in the longer history of African American letters. To be sure, the vernacular has always held a place in African American literary expression, but through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries standard English and Anglo-American literary models were the norm (indeed the ideal for many) in addressing both African American and white audiences. It was the Harlem Renaissance that radically relocated the folk, indeed reinvented an African American literary vocabulary based on folk forms, idioms, and patterns of speech; and in doing so, the Harlem Renaissance bequeathed a legacy that would shape African American literature throughout the twentieth century and up to the present day.

The legacy of Harlem Renaissance artistry begins in the larger context of the New Negro Movement, the late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century political and cultural movement to reclaim the civil rights guaranteed through Reconstruction legislation. The New Negro generation created political organizations, published magazines and newspapers, attended colleges and universities in unprecedented numbers, and pursued professional careers all in the name of African American equality, inclusion, and full citizenship.

One of the effects of the Harlem Renaissance was to bring people of disparate backgrounds together in common cause. Such was the case with George Schuyler and Wallace Thurman, two of the era's major satirists. Schuyler was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1895 and raised in Syracuse, New York. He started writing while serving in the United States Army and moved on to a long and controversial career that lasted until his death in 1977. Wallace Thurman was born (1902) and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah; he was educated at both the University of Utah and the University of Southern California before coming to New York City in 1925. Thurman's career was both exceptional and tragically short; he died of tuberculosis in 1934. Despite their different backgrounds, both writers ended up moving in important Harlem Renaissance literary and intellectual circles from 1925 onwards. By the same token, both Schuyler and Thurman ended up adopting significant and very complex roles as intellectual champions of some of the movement's prime ideals and as satirical excoriators on the age's foibles and excesses. Thurman and Schuyler took seriously the discussions of race and culture that circulated all around them, but they refused to see the major social and aesthetic concerns of the time as anything that could be easily understood, corrected, or improved. Their interventions into the political and artistic discourses of the 1920s and 30s were meant to counteract the romanticization of Harlem at that time and provide for their readers a healthy skepticism toward issues of race, color, nationalism, and conformism.

In 1945 the editors of the Atlanta University journal Phylon wrote to a sixty-five-year-old Carl Van Vechten and asked for his comments on a Hugh Gloster essay they were publishing. Gloster's “The Van Vechten Vogue” sketched out the influence of the best-known white American - half architect, half voyeur - connected to the explosion of black writing in the 1920s. Phylon's editors, the sharp-minded young sociologist Ira de a Reid and the illustrious W.E. B. Du Bois, printed Van Vechten's brief comment. According to the man who had been the leading light of the “Negrotarians,” the white cultivators and supporters committed to the exploration of black life in Manhattan in the 1920s, Gloster was so “eminently fair” in his essay that nothing was left to say. The novelist, photographer, and spirited collector of African American letters could not avoid the fact that he was seeing something that he had predicted would end certain varieties of discrimination. “Negroes are kept down because they lack NERVE and initiative,” Van Vechten had written to his friend Langston Hughes in 1942. Gloster showed both qualities, hallmarks of a new generation of writers and critics, a cadre that would rely considerably less on the support of individual patrons like Van Vechten. He was a man whose era had passed and whose most deeply held convictions about racial equality led the way to the vastly reduced scope of his own role.

In his essay, Gloster targeted not even so much Van Vechten singly as the entire movement during which Van Vechten's most famous relationships with Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neal Hurston, and Nella Larsen, among many others, had flourished. In an unusually ironic twist of fate, the movement for black artistic development in the United States, always hand-in-glove with the larger movement for racial justice, and the even broader shift for modernist artistic expression, seemed deliberately employing segregationist logic in its historical self-representation.

In 1923, amongst the many reviews of Jean Toomer's Cane, came two of very contrasting opinion. Disdaining “certain innovators who conceive language to be little more than a series of ejaculatory spasms,” the Minneapolis Journal suggested “if the Negro (and the south) is to become really articulate its new writers must seek better models than those Mr Toomer follows.” In contrast, the African American critic Montgomery Gregory, writing in the first issue of Opportunity, soon to become the pre-eminent forum for the incipient New Negro Renaissance, waxed more lyrical:

Despite their differences in opinion, these reviews nonetheless shared the evaluative criteria that characterized the reaction to Cane - and determined its importance - both in 1923 and in most of the subsequent (and voluminous) criticism devoted to it. Both were concerned with the effectiveness of the formal innovations and formal eclecticism of the work; with how well Jean Toomer had found either a voice or an “aesthetic equivalent” for the South; and to what degree Toomer was a “representative man,” a figurehead and a model for subsequent African American writing.

The Harlem Renaissance – what a complex and conflicted aura the term evokes! People can scarcely agree on what it means. A vogue. A blossoming. A failure. A foundation. A few stars. A movement of black self-assertion against white supremacy, connected with anticolonial movements worldwide, or a local phenomenon gradually co-opted and destroyed by white voyeurs, cultural colonialists taking advantage of black naifs, opportunists, or weak-kneed bourgeois artists. A post hoc invention of cultural historians, now abundantly exploited by publishers, New York tour guides, and even, of late, real estate investors.

What is commonly called the Harlem Renaissance today was known as the Negro Renaissance in its own time. “Negro”: a word of pride, of strong vowels and a capital N. The thick diagonal strode forward and put its foot down. “Negro” no longer signifies to most people what it did in the early to mid-twentieth century. A Spanish derivative, it did not exactly mean “Black” in American English – it was sui generis, a word only used to indicate persons of the slightest (non-“white”) sub-Saharan African descent, regardless of color, but it seized on the essential meaning of the metaphor of the one mighty “drop [of blood]” that made one “black.” Racial segregation was racing toward its apogee. Race was the word of the hour. Race suicide. Race purity. Race man. Race woman. The Passing of the Great Race. “Arise, O Mighty Race!” Enter the New Negro.

The exceptional character of the Harlem Renaissance as a watershed of selfdirected “Negro” arts and letters and the popular view of its centralization in Harlem have led to an unfortunate occlusion of its international dimensions. The “New Negro Movement” bloomed within a global network of epiphenomenal cultural nationalisms and folk revivals. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, pulses of decolonization rippled throughout Asia, the Caribbean, and Ireland, catalyzed by China's 1901 Boxer Rebellion, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and postwar efforts to accommodate European ethnic minorities in their struggles for self-determination. Much of the scholarship surrounding the Harlem Renaissance, however, has approached it at the expense of the global as a phenomenon of primarily national significance despite the persistent emphasis on internationalism in the works and life experiences of the movement's leading figures. Even when this emphasis is noted, as with the much-studied Negro vogues of Paris and Berlin, the international scope of the movement's influence and impact has been conceptualized according to an American context rooted in slavery, reconstruction, migration, and segregation. Nevertheless, a few scholars, such as Robert Stepto, Michel Fabre, and Melvin Dixon, have outlined the global contours of the Harlem Renaissance currently being reexamined and theorized anew by Brent Hayes Edwards, George Hutchinson, and others, so that the transnational shape of the movement and the disparate worldviews of its writers may come more fully into view.

In an America that prided itself on its exceptionalism, it was the Negro who was the most important exception to American citizenship. Unlike other Americans, with the exception of the Native Americans, African Americans had to wait until the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1867, two hundred years after first arriving in North America, to become citizens, and wait another hundred years before they could exercise the rights of citizens everywhere in the nation. Because America has prided itself on its self-proclaimed pluralism, its justly lauded achievement of blending together so many diverse peoples into a common culture, some questions remained. What about the Negro? How could the Negro enter into an American notion of citizenship that was predicated on immigrants becoming “white” by defining themselves as “not black?” How could black people become citizens if black exclusion was the very ground of citizenship for others? Frederick Douglass perhaps put it best. Douglass asserted that Lincoln was a great man and the father of the new white nation that came into being with the Civil War. But the Negro was only Lincoln's stepchild, a fatherless child who had to find his or her own way into a citizenship alone. What was simply a passing anomaly to the rest of Americans marching to the drumbeat of celebratory democracy became, for the black citizen, what Henry James called a complex fate – for to forge a Negro into an American citizen would require that both America and the Negro be changed.

Jessie Fauset once told an interviewer that she, Walter White, and Nella Larsen became novelists after reading T. S. Stribling's Birthright, a novel that depicted the return of a newly minted black Harvard graduate to his southern hometown. His efforts at racial uplift flounder; his end is predictably tragic. Versions of this story had been told before, notably in Charles Chesnutt's novel The Marrow of Tradition and W. E. B. Du Bois' short story “Of the Coming of John” in The Souls of Black Folk, for example. But Stribling, a white author writing on the cusp of the Harlem Renaissance, found an unusually responsive audience. His black readers noted that response as well as the fallacies in Stribling's fiction, which suggested that the protagonist's tragedy is his black ancestry, while his ambitions derive from his “white blood.” Fauset and White knew better. Deigning to speak for her peers, Fauset reasoned: “here is an audience waiting to hear the truth about us. Let us, who are better qualified to represent that truth than any white writer, try to do so.” White responded similarly, when he observed that Stribling had written his story from the outside. When White's friend H. L. Mencken challenged him to write a better book, he began work on The Fire in the Flint. Like Birthright, it depicts a northern-trained black physician who brings his skills to uplift a rural southern community. Many of the novel's details are drawn from White's experiences as the assistant field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). For Fauset and White, the commitment to a single verifiable truth both inspires and cripples their fiction. Their non-fiction, by contrast, remains powerful.

An essay “On Being Young - a Woman - and Colored” (1925), written by Marita Bonner, offers a profound glimpse into the ethos of women's writing of the Harlem Renaissance. At the end of this essay Bonner muses, “Perhaps Buddha is a woman,” as she decides that the image of Buddha may best describe what it meant in 1925 to be “young - a woman - and colored.” The image of the brown Buddha presents the young “colored” woman as contained but somehow moving in spite of the appearance of stasis. Bonner writes, “Like Buddha - who, brown like I am - sat entirely at ease, entirely sure of himself; motionless and knowing, a thousand years before the white man knew there was so very much difference between feet and hands. Motionless on the outside. But inside?” (112). This image captures the complexity of Harlem Renaissance women's poetry. “On Being Young - a Woman - and Colored” was published the same year, 1925, as the pivotal, male-oriented anthology The New Negro. As opposed to Locke's archetype of the “New Negro,” Marita Bonner makes Buddha her prime archetype for the young “colored” women emerging in 1925. The very image of the “colored” female Buddha evokes a peaceful hybrid fusion of the old and the new as opposed to Locke's vehement differentiation between the “Old Negro” and the “New Negro.” The female Buddha is imagined as the best way to counter the stereotypes that deny black women's aesthetic sensibilities and femininity. Bonner wonders why a black woman must be viewed as a “feminine Caliban craving to pass for Ariel” (111). This notion of the black woman passing for Ariel, presumably an image of refined white womanhood, illuminates the nexus of gender, class, and race constraints negotiated by women poets of the Harlem Renaissance.

“It was the period when the Negro was in vogue.” These words introduce readers of The Big Sea, a 1940 autobiography by Langston Hughes, to the era known today as the Harlem Renaissance, which commenced in 1924, and was the first significant literary and cultural movement in African American history. This sentence by Hughes captures what was at once transcendent and dispiriting about the era. The Harlem Renaissance was a moment when blackness was celebrated; but to be in vogue is to be in fashion, and fashions always die. As an era concerned with the vitalization as well as with the demise of African American identity, the Harlem Renaissance was an era best characterized by its contradictions: every point of celebration was also a source of contention. This chapter begins with a discussion of the contradictions at the root of the ideological issues that occasioned what was both glorious and grim about Harlem in the 1920s. But before we can get to the achievements of the Harlem Renaissance, we must confront the problems inherent in the term “Harlem Renaissance” itself.

Was the Harlem Renaissance an actual renaissance? Scholarship on this period supports competing points of view. Webster's New World Dictionary defines a “renaissance” as a “rebirth” or “revival.” Some historians and critics believe that what took place during the Harlem Renaissance years was not a rebirth, as such, but only another stage in the evolution of African and African American art that had begun with the inception of African presence in America. While it is true that African and African American art forms never died – new ones were created and evolved even during slavery – a particular black American identity was born after Emancipation, and that was the “New Negro.” The Harlem Renaissance is also known as the New Negro Movement.

Between 1789 and 1989 Europe and then the world chased the rapidly receding hope that human society could be remade. The struggle to renew the social order reached its zenith in the years before 1945 in modernism, socialism, Freudianism, expressionism, Bolshevism, Fascism, Nazism, the New Deal, the Mexican Revolution, Peronism and Gandhian nationalism. After 1945, the world froze into two blocks in which both the West and the East feared and suppressed experimentation, hunted and imprisoned radicals and stamped out the danger represented by the “youth movements”, the last and least powerful of the great attempts to transform human nature. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states ended the French revolutionary age and its attendant “isms”. Since 1991 Western capitalism has become the universal form of economic enterprise but with unexpected consequences. The two most populous states of the world, India and China, have turned out to be very good at capitalism and now threaten the economic futures of the United States and the European Union. Globalisation has also called forth the genie of resistance from the ancient Arab bottle – Wahabi Islam has emerged to reject every aspect of the great European experiment, especially the emancipation of women, in the name of an ancient theocratic puritanism.

With this scathing critique André Levinson, the most prominent defender of the nineteenth-century balletic canon, assessed George Balanchine's Le Bal (The Ball, 1929). As anyone familiar with Balanchine's career knows, this is a surprisingly harsh treatment of the choreographer who has come to epitomise the resuscitation of classical ballet in the twentieth century. scholars invariably place Balanchine within an “apostolic succession” of ballet masters “extending back in time through Petipa, and Didelot before him, to Noverre and Lully”, the founding fathers of the genre. Often, his irreverent attitude towards classicism in his early work is dismissed as lacking the mature, pure-dance approach of his later years. Balanchine himself set the tone of this interpretation by allowing more unorthodox works, including Le Bal, to fall out of repertory – and by altering the choreography of such early ballets as Apollon musagète (Apollo, Leader of the Muses, 1928) in order to stress their continuity with the classical tradition.

In 1908, a collection of articles on contemporary Russian theatre appeared in St Petersburg. Modestly titled Theatre. A Book on the New Theatre, the volume featured contributions by the painter Alexandre Benois, theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, future Commissar of Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky, the symbolist poets Andrey Bely and Valery Bryusov, and novelist Fyodor Sologub. The diversity of this group suggests the significance of Russian theatre in St Petersburg at the turn of the century and the breadth of the quest for new forms in the arts in Russia in the early years of the twentieth century. The writers mostly advocated the latest movement in Russian theatre, shaped as it was by a fascination with emerging symbolist tendencies that sought to correct, or at least to dethrone, the naturalism of Konstantin Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre, though Stanislavsky's innovations were still relatively new.

One year after the theatre volume appeared, Sergey Diaghilev presented Russian dancers in five ballets in his Saisons russes in Paris. The fame and notoriety of this “new” dance from Russia would soon eclipse the discussion of new theatre – and outlast that earlier phenomenon. Nonetheless, Russia's new ballet owed much to the experimentation of new theatre. The new ballet emerged alongside it, and, like the new theatre, new dance was simpler to define by what it was not. However variously writers conceived of the ‘new’ ballet, one thing was clear: Marius Petipa and the large repertory he created for the Russian Imperial Ballet represented the old.